DŌGEN

Dōgen (1200–1253), an early Japanese Zen figure, is regarded as the founder of the Japanese Sōtō school of Chan Buddhism (Japanese, Zen). Born to an aristocratic family, Dōgen entered the Buddhist order as a child. After studying Tiantai Buddhism (Japanese, Tendai), he became a follower of Myōzen (1184–1225), who was a disciple of Eisai (1141–1215), a prominent Japanese exponent of Zen. In 1223 Dōgen accompanied Myōzen to China, where he stayed at the Jingde Monastery on Mount Tiantong. There, he received dharma transmission from the abbot, Tiandong Rujing (1163–1228), in the Caodong (Japanese, Sōtō) lineage. Returning to Japan in 1227, Dōgen established Kōshōji, a monastery near the capital of Heiankyo (modern Kyoto), making it one of the first Japanese institutions to introduce the Song-dynasty style of Chan monastic practice. Dōgen soon attracted a following, including monks of the so-called Daruma school, who would become the leaders of the early Sōtō community. In 1242 Dōgen left the capital area for Echizen (modern Fukui prefecture), where he founded Eiheiji (originally named Daibutsuji), the monastery that subsequently became the headquarters of one faction of the Sōtō school. Except for a brief trip to the new military capital at Kamakura in 1247, he spent his remaining years at Eiheiji, returning to Heian-kyō only in the last days of his final illness.

Dōgen was a prolific author who composed essays on Zen practice such as the Fukan zazengi (Universal Promotion of the Principles of Seated Meditation) and Gakudō yōjinshu (Admonitions on the Study of the Way); treatises on Zen monastic rules, later collected under the title Eihei shingi (Eihei Rules of Purity); a record of his study with Rujing entitled Hōkyōki (Record of the Hōkyō Era); and Japanese verse collected as Sanshō dōei (Songs of the Way from Mount Sanshō). Dōgen's teachings were collected in a ten-volume work entitled Eihei kōroku (The Extended Record of Eihei).

Among his writings, Dōgen is best known for ShŌbŌgenzŌ (Treasury of the Eye of the True Dharma), a collection of vernacular essays composed over many years. Modern editions contain approximately ninety-five texts, but the work has come down in several redactions, and the original form of the collection remains uncertain. Though there is some variation in genre, the majority of the essays develop their themes through comments on passages from the literature recording the teachings of the Chinese Chan masters, from which the collection takes its name. Though seemingly little studied for several centuries after their composition, the texts of the Shōbōgenzō became a primary source for the development of Sōtō Zen doctrine during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the Shōbōgenzō has been the object of many commentaries from that time up to the present. In the twentieth century, the work became highly regarded as a classic of Japanese Buddhist thought and was much studied by scholars of philosophy, religion, intellectual history, language, and literature. The texts of the Shōbōgenzō have been translated several times into modern Japanese, as well as into English and other Western languages.

See also:Chan School; Japan; Tiantai School

Bibliography

Bielefeldt, Carl. Dōgen's Manuals of Zen Meditation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Bodiford, William. Sōtō Zen in Medieval Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993.

Carl Bielefeldt